'Saving a life is expensive'

In her continuing series of interviews with experts in development, Anne Perkins speaks to the new director of the Overseas Development Institute, Alison Evans, who believes people should be told the real cost of change

Bringing about change takes more than a £1 in a tin, says Alison Evans. Photograph: Dan Chung Guardian

But where Moyo, a Zambian by birth, had a career on Wall Street and is an evangelist for enterprise as the route to development, Evans is a British academic with six years at the World Bank and a focus on poverty reduction. At the beginning of the month she became director of the leading UK thinktank on international development, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

Evans does not dispute sub-Saharan Africa's patchy and disappointing rate of development. But she does question Moyo's thesis that it is caused by the west's aid policies.

"Aid is only one part of development. Development is messy and complex and subject to reversal and there are few magic bullets," she says.

"The problem is that the critics of aid don't need to work hard," she points out to me. "Its defenders do."

It seems a particularly dangerous argument to be having now. The collapse of remittance incomes and the spike in food prices and global economic gloom are expected to force as many as 100 million people back into poverty just as they were beginning to work their way out of it.

Evans wants plain speaking. "Aid doesn't work everywhere. You have to be constantly vigilant about doing it better, doing it differently. And we need to be able to speak to the UK public about its complexities."

Under Evans' predecessor, Simon Maxwell, the ODI never hid its doubts about the effectiveness of community development projects like Katine. It is not the value of the project within the village that Evans, like Maxwell, questions, but what happens after the intensive three-year project is over - and how the project can be scaled up across the area.

"We've been through many different phases of development," Evans says. "Some [like community development] have been around before. We fully accept you can achieve results.

[But] there is a real, genuine worry that having seen initial success it won't last. It starts with a village, but it doesn't end with it. You can get good results on a micro-scale – but what about the other 400 villages. The complexities of scaling up are significant. Development has never been built up village by village, it's been by major movements."

Where Evans does support the project enthusiastically is its sense of journey, its struggle to convey the light and shade of development.

"Through the engagement of the Guardian and the website an interesting debate is opening," she says. "Campaigns around poor communities tend to put a price on saving a life. It looks so easy, it's just the change in your pocket.

"But change on the ground is difficult. When you begin to see how difficult it is, it is very valuable. People are beyond whitewash. They don't want spin. They'd rather know, they need it to be real. And it does much more damage to over claim, or to have no transparency. The public doesn't want to be sold a sop."

There is an unstated criticism in her remarks of fundraising campaigns that present development in terms of the individual donation.

"You cheapen debate by talking about what a pound can do," she argues. "It belies what's behind it. Saving a life is expensive. At times there's been a tendency to be a bit scared [to explain that] a health centre here means better services there."

Katine's critics always arrive at the same point: the need for transformative development, what politicians in the UK like to call a "step change". And step changes involve disruption and uncertainty.

"People will have to move to create wealth on a scale. A subsistence economy cannot do it. The risk/reward set does look very difficult. It needs foreign investment, different service industries, a critical mass of education.

"If you're going to start with a village, it has to tie into these choices. You are not just supporting one community. You have to get people into money making and value adding businesses, like horticulture or coffee. You cannot get there from subsistence farming."

The ODI works closely with the UK's Department for International Development. It has produced evidence that supports the government's budget support strategy, which is at least as controversial in some quarters as community development.

USAid, for example, sees it as merely endorsing corrupt regimes. It's quite the reverse, Evans retorts. Budget support is the way to reform.

The ODI's own research, she says, shows that working with both national and local government to ensure both do their job more effectively makes an important contribution to creating the good governance that is indispensable to all successful development – the secure, rule-based environment where people can have confidence in their power to shape their own future.

Evans explains: "Budget support matches external assistance with the way in which governments do business, and so it provides an opportunity for dialogue with government about how to do it better – and how to do it progressively. It's consistent with that and an entry point for dialogue."

Another criticism of budget support is that it can come with too many strings as donor states insist their cash is spent on achieving ends the donors think are desirable.

Not so, says Evans. "It gets you as close as humanly possible to treating external resources as if they are tax revenue. Yes, there is a question about how you prevent funds being mishandled. The answer is through unsexy things like management and accountability, auditing and transparency."

The other criticism, made powerfully in Uganda by commentators like Andrew Mwenda, is that budget support can lead government to focus on managing its donors rather than listening to its voters.

On the contrary, says Evans. The kind of projectised aid delivered by the US system entirely replaces government. "We say development aid must make sense to your citizens. Resources like development priorities and monitoring and evaluation are of a different order now compared with a decade ago.

"Critics have a point that it's been in the corridors of power for a long time. Change has been elongated – and much more needs to be done to make sure monitoring is happening. And how does that happen? Through making governments work more effectively."